According to a report from Georgia’s WRBL, the Pentagon is offering 14,000 combat-related roles to women. Before, women were excluded from positions if they were too close or directly involved in combat.

Not so surprisingly, this news comes about a month after Katy Perry released her “Part of Me” video, an obvious piece of propaganda deployed to depict the army as a receptive haven for desperate women.

As disheartening as this may be to some, the video’s message was not to empower women.

As Alex predicted, it was all propaganda designed to get everybody ready for women on the front lines.

In the video below, Alex expresses how Katy Perry will likely be relaxing in her mansion sipping wine while women who were duped by her recruitment video fight lice infestations, get injected with poisonous vaccines, and are used as camp prostitutes.

If “camp prostitutes” sounds like we’re going a bit too far, one need look no further than the case of Pvt. LaVena Johnson who was raped, burned, and murdered on her own military base.

This female recruitment announcement is the Pentagon’s latest effort to advance the military industrial complex’s agenda all while instituting a collapse of the basic family home structure.

In 2003, we found the Pentagon engaged in another female Psy-Op in which the Military Times came out touting Pfc. Jessica Lynch’s Iraqi capture as “heroic,” alleging she put up quite a fight, completely unloading her M-16 rifle. It was later revealed that she never fired a single round.

What’s worse is that Perry’s man-hating video depicts the army as an escape from our male-dominated society, when in actuality the army is almost fully dominated by men.

This type of propaganda is reminiscent of Edward Bernay’s 1929 tobacco industry campaign – a stunt designed to attract and addict females to cancer-causing cigarettes all while expanding the cigarette manufacturers’ market.

It is strongly encouraged that anyone interested in becoming part of the industrial war machine known as the army do research prior to enlisting. Despite their exhaustive advertisements showing women in the army to be all-powerful, you can rest assured that this is just another government Psy-Op designed to bring down the core of the traditional family structure.

Adan Salazar, Infowars

Lured by the prospect of reducing oil dependence, President Obama’s ambivalent approach has ultimately yielded ground to industry. Lured by the same prospect, countries all around the world have joined the shale-gas craze, and many use the fact that the U.S. has been “fracking” as proof that it is safe. William Engdahl provides the full picture.

There is a global rush to embrace a new source of extracting hydrocarbons from the Earth. From Germany to Poland and France, from China and above all in the USA where the technique of hydraulic fracturing of shale rocks is most developed, governments and major oil companies are producing huge volumes of gas.

A number of energy importing countries around the world are planning a major investment in extracting natural gas from their shale rock formations. The most ambitious plans are coming from China and from Poland in the EU.

The US Government’s Department of Energy together with a Washington energy consultancy has just released a mammoth global report estimating resources of shale gas. Significantly, the report estimates that the largest untapped shale gas reserves worldwide lie in China. The study puts Poland and France at the top of the shale gas list in the EU. The rest of Europe they estimate simply lacks the geology where substantial shale rock is present.

Even in Germany some cash-strapped states are seriously looking at Shale gas. ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil company is planning major projects in the densely-populated North-Rhein Westphalia region.

The company’s head for Central Europe, Gernot Kalkoffen in a recent interview stated, “Germany is most definitely an interesting market. We cannot achieve the energy strategy shift without gas.” ExxonMobil estimates shale gas is potentially available in six of Germany’s 16 states.

The US Energy Department estimates that Germany could have some 8 trillion cubic feet of technically recoverable shale gas, three years’ total consumption. Citizen protest groups and Parliamentary skepticism about health and safety of shale gas so far is braking a German shale gas bonanza.

Not only ExxonMobil but also BASF’s Wintershall, Gaz de France, BNK Petroleum from the US and a daughter of Britain’s Royal Dutch Shell are salivating over German shale gas prospects.

The Polish government is in a state of near euphoria over the prospects of exploiting its shale gas resources. Prime Minister Donald Tusk calls shale gas Poland’s “great chance,” because it could cut its dependence on Russian gas, create tens of thousands of jobs and fill state coffers.

In tests at one well in northern Poland done last August, the Polish Geological Institute claimed that Hydraulic fracturing didn’t affect the quality or quantity of surface and ground water and didn’t cause tremors that would pose a threat to buildings or other infrastructure. The US oilfield services giant Schlumberger did the fracking.

Of course one test in one well is hardly conclusive, though the Tusk government doesn’t seem to care as they push Brussels to launch a major Polish shale gas exploitation program.

In China, shale gas looks about to take off as a major new focus for the country’s enormous energy requirements. The governing State Council has recently approved shale gas as an “independent mineral resource” and the Ministry of Land and Resources will conduct an appraisal of shale gas resources this year to expedite discovery and development of China shale deposits.

Until now China’s rough mountainous terrain and lack of shale gas fracking know-how has kept it out of the shale gas, with coal far the major source of electric power. The French oil giant, Total, has just signed a deal with China’s Sinopec to produce shale gas in China.

China has around 31 trillion cubic meters of natural gas trapped in shale, some 50% greater than the United States according to the US Department of Energy estimate.  These are volumes to make the head of any respectable state official spin.

One exception to the shale gas rush is Germany where the Federal Government just decided to prohibit ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil company, from fracking in the eastern part of the country, stating they were “very skeptical” of industry claims it would not poison ground water or cause earthquake damage.

Myth and reality: The Halliburton Loophole

Fracking techniques have been around since the end of World War II. Why then suddenly is the world going gaga over shale gas hydraulic fracking? One answer is the record high oil and gas prices of the recent few years have made the costly fracking profitable.

The second reason is the advance of various horizontal underground drilling techniques that allow companies like Schlumberger to enter a large shale rock formation and inject substances to “free” the trapped gas.

But the real reason for the recent explosion of fracking in the country where it has most been applied, the United States, is the passage of legislation in 2005 by the US Congress that exempts the oil industry’s hydraulic fracking activity from regulatory supervision by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

The oil and gas industry is the only industry in America that is allowed by EPA to inject known hazardous materials — unchecked — directly into or adjacent to underground drinking water supplies.

The law is known as the “Halliburton Loophole.” That’s because it was introduced on massive lobbying pressure from the company that produces the lion’s share of chemical hydraulic fracking fluids—Dick Cheney’s old company, Halliburton. When he became Vice President under George W. Bush in early 2001, Bush immediately gave Cheney responsibility for a major Energy Task Force to make a comprehensive national energy strategy.

Aside from looking at Iraq oil potentials as documents later revealed, Cheney’s task force used Cheney’s considerable political muscle and industry lobbying money to win exemption from the Safe Drinking Water Act.

During Cheney’s term as vice president he moved to make sure the Government’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would give a green light to a major expansion of shale gas drilling in the US. In 2004 the EPA issued a study of the environmental effects of fracking. That study has been called “scientifically unsound” by EPA whistleblower Weston Wilson.

In March of 2005, EPA Inspector General Nikki Tinsley found enough evidence of potential mishandling of the EPA hydraulic fracturing study to justify a review of Wilson’s complaints.

The Oil and Gas Accountability Project conducted a review of the EPA study which found that EPA removed information from earlier drafts that suggested unregulated fracturing poses a threat to human health, and that the Agency did not include information that suggests “fracturing fluids may pose a threat to drinking water long after drilling operations are completed.”

The Halliburton Loophole is no minor affair. The process of hydraulic fracking to extract gas involves staggering volumes of water and of some of the most toxic chemicals known.

During the uproar over the BP Deepwater Horizon Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the Obama Administration and the Energy Department formed an advisory commission on Shale Gas. Their report was released in November 2011. It was what could only be called a “whitewash” of the dangers of shale gas.

The commission was headed by former CIA director John Deuss. Deuss sits on the board of Citigroup, one of the world’s most active energy industry banks, tied to the Rockefeller family.

He also sits on the board of Schlumberger, along with Halliburton, the major company doing hydraulic fracking. In fact, of the seven panel members, six had ties to the energy industry. Little surprise that the Deuss report called shale gas, “the best piece of news about energy in the last 50 years.” Deuss added, “Over the long term it has the potential to displace liquid fuels in the United States.”

In the US oil industry people have forgotten the scare about oil and gas depletion, popularly known as the Peak Oil theory in their new euphoria over huge new volumes of gas and also oil obtained by fracking of shale and coal beds. Now even the Obama Administration is talking about a renaissance in domestic oil production.

The reason is the dramatic rise in domestic extraction of gas from hydraulic fracking of shale, using new fracking techniques first developed by Dick Cheney’s old company, Halliburton, made financially lucrative with the advent of $100 a barrel oil since 2008.

Reportedly under pressure from then Vice President Cheney, chemical or hydraulic fracking of shale rock and coal beds has been left unregulated under what has become known as the Halliburton Loophole in the 2005 US National Energy Bill.

To access the gas, the shale needs to be fractured using a mixture of hot water, sand and chemical additives, some of which are highly poisonous. Attempts by citizen organizations and individual litigants to force oil services company disclosure of the composition of chemicals used in hydraulic fracking have met a stone wall of silence.

The companies argue that the chemicals are proprietary secrets and that disclosing them would hurt their competitiveness. They also insist the process is “basically safe and that regulating it would deter domestic production.”  This legal sleight of hand lets the fracking lobby have their cake and eat it too.

They claim it is safe, refuse to say what chemicals are used and insist it be free from the Environmental Protection Administration rules under the Safe Drinking Water Act. If they are right about how safe their chemical fracking fluids are why are they afraid of regulation like other chemical companies?
Fracking toxic waste

To understand what is going on, in a typical shale gas fracturing operation, a company drills a hole several thousand meters below surface; then they drill a horizontal branch perhaps one kilometer in length.

As one expert described the fracking, once the horizontal drilling into the shale formation is done, “you send down a kind of subterranean pipe bomb, a small package of ball-bearing-like shrapnel and light explosives.

The package is detonated, and the shrapnel pierces the bore hole, opening up small perforations in the pipe. They then pump up to 7 million gallons of a substance known as slick water to fracture the shale and release the gas.

It blasts through those perforations in the pipe into the shale at such force—more than nine thousand pounds of pressure per square inch—that it shatters the shale for a few yards on either side of the pipe, allowing the gas embedded in it to rise under its own pressure and escape.”

The shale rock in which the gas is trapped is so tight that it has to be broken in order for the gas to escape. Therein come the problems. A combination of sand and water laced with chemicals — including benzene — is pumped into the well bore at high pressure, shattering the rock and opening millions of tiny fissures, enabling the shale gas to seep into the pipeline.

Not only does it liberate gas or in the case of Bakken, oil. It floods the shale formation with millions of gallons of toxic fluids. A study conducted by Theo Colburn, PhD, director of the Endocrine Disruption Exchange in Paonia, Colorado, identified 65 chemicals that are probable components of the fracking fluids used by shale gas drillers.

These chemicals included benzene, glycol-ethers, toluene, 2-(2-methoxyethoxy) ethanol, and nonylphenols. All of those chemicals have been linked to health disorders when human exposure is too high. Dr. Anthony Ingraffea, D. C. Baum Professor of Engineering at Cornell University, who has researched fracture mechanics for more than 30 years, has said that drilling and hydraulic fracturing “can liberate biogenic natural gas into a fresh water aquifer.”

Not only possibly poisoning the fresh water underground aquifers, hydraulic fracking is done with such force that it has been known to cause earthquakes. In the UK, Cuadrilla was doing shale gas drilling in Lancashire. They suspended their shale gas test drilling in June 2011, following two earthquakes—one tremor of magnitude 2.3 hit the Fylde coast on 1 April, followed by a second of magnitude 1.4 on 27 May.

A UK Government study of the earthquakes, released in April concluded that the fracking drilling operations had caused the quakes. Earthquake activity in fracking regions across the US have also been reported.

Alarmingly, in the case of exploiting shale gas in China, the largest shale formation lies in Sechuan Province in China’s east, one of the most active earthquake zones in Asia. Additionally, given the documented dangers to ground water from extensive fracking, China’s chronic water shortages are threatened as well.

The new technique of hydraulic fracking was first used successfully in the late 1990s in the Barnett Shale in Texas, and is now being used to liberate oil from beneath the Bakken Shale in North Dakota.

But the largest shale gas fracking activity in the US has been a literal gas bonanza drilling boom in the Marcellus Shale that runs from West Virginia into upstate New York, estimated estimated to hold as much gas as the whole United States consumes in a century. More recent estimates put the figure at half that or lower, suggesting the energy industry is using hype to promote its methods.
Good news bad news

Good news is shale gas shows how wrong the peak oil lobby is about depletion of global hydrocarbons. Gas like coal and oil are according to their definition all “fossil fuels.”

While we leave aside whether in fact they are from dinosaur detritus or fossilized algae, clearly the Earth is far from peaking in its hydrocarbon resources. Bad news is diverting valuable resources from finding abundant conventional gas or oil using advanced new methods.

F. William Engdahl , voltairenet

­Nasrallah’s film is in the running for the Golden Palm award at the Cannes International Film Festival, known for screening politicized films, among others.

“A number of great Israeli directors are my friends, such as Avi Mograbi and Amos Gitaï. But it’s not me who decides whether the films should be sold to Israel or not,” added the director who made 6 films in 20 years.
Nasrallah is known for bringing political context to the screen. In 2004, he made Gate of Sun, a drama about the history of Palestinian fighters.

“I don’t think that while the Egyptians are still in their first stage moving towards liberation from their own regime, from oppression and military governance, Israel would be an ally in favor of such liberation,” the 60-year-old movie maker told the media conference at the world’s most far-reaching festival.

After the Battle brings to the silver screen the bloody aftermath of the Arab Spring, when Tahrir Square in Cairo became the volcanic epicenter of a revolt that led to the ousting of long-term Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak.
Egyptian protesters clash with riot police along a road which leads to the Interior Ministry, near Tahrir Square, in Cairo on November 23, 2011 (AFP Photo / Mahmud Hams)

The film’s director had himself spent much time in Tahrir Square during the crucial events. He witnessed what he described as “the euphoria of the people and their excitement.”

The process of shooting the movie was affected by real-life events. Actors also discussed the situation with residents of Nazker El-Samman, a village at the foot of the Giza pyramids and home to some 50,000 people. A number of them had their say in Nasrallah’s drama. It took the Cairo-born director 48 days to shoot After the Battle, which has a documentary feel about it.

Last January, on National Police Day, tens of thousands of Egyptians took part in peaceful demonstrations against Mubarak’s regime. The police dispersed the protesters using tear gas and water cannons. In the wake of the “one million march” Mubarak announced he would not run in the next presidential election. On February 2, the notorious Battle of the Camels took place when pro-Mubarak forces attacked the protesters, provoking a series of violent confrontations.

RT

Richard Trumka, President of the AFL-CIO, stated “Look, I support that position. We support it as the labor movement because of discrimination.” He explained, “There are 1,128 obligations and benefits you get from being married, responsibilities and obligations, as well as some benefits.

We think that everybody ought to be treated equally. So it’s marriage equality we’re looking at, and people shouldn’t be discriminated against.”

While many union members likely disagree with Trumka’s stance, support of same sex marriage and all civil rights is the only position that is consistent with the interests of working people as a whole.

Though unions are generally focused on better wages, benefits, and working conditions for their membership, they cannot take effective action for these needs without building broad unity among all workers regardless of race, nationality, gender, or sexual orientation. Consequently, since the mass efforts of the LGBT community have galvanized around the issue of marriage equality, the union movement needs to get behind it.

For LGBT workers, this issue is as central to their lives as their working conditions. For those workers who are currently opposed to same sex marriage, they need to learn that they are better able to struggle for improvements in their lives if they are united with their gay brothers and sisters. Given the bipartisan attacks against workers, they cannot afford to let their prejudices get in the way.

Nevertheless, the uncritical praise for President Obama’s remarks create the impression that they have been more motivated to getting him re-elected than as commitment to LGBT equality. This is because Obama’s remarks fell far short from the step forward for which they are being touted. In fact, politically they are a step backwards. The President did not say he considered marriage equality a civil right.

Moreover, he made it a point of stating that he considered the matter of same sex marriage best decided on a state-by-state basis. This has been the fall back position for every two-faced faker in civil rights’ struggles from the days of slavery and Jim Crow to Roe v. Wade. In other words this means that Obama condones discrimination where bigots have the political upper hand.

President Obama’s advocating of a state-by-state approach towards marriage equality undermines the efforts of those who are fighting for it as a constitutional civil rights issue. Jim Cook, in his article “Barack Obama’s Bullshit Gay Marriage Announcement” explains:

“There are currently at least three cases winding their way toward federal courts that address the issue of whether (among other things) the equal protection clause of the constitution guarantees gay men and women the same access to marriage rights as heterosexual men and women

— the Proposition 8 case, in which David Boies and Ted Olson challenged California’s ban on gay marriage, and several challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act, which bars gay men and women from receiving federal marriage benefits and allows states to refuse to recognize valid gay marriages.

Obama’s Justice Department has admirably declined to defend the constitutionality of DOMA. But the position he enunciated today is in opposition to Boies and Olson: Obama is saying that if he were a judge, he would have rejected Boies and Olson’s constitutional arguments and affirmed the right of Californians to enshrine bigotry in their state constitution.”

Experience has shown that this president’s “support” for progressive measures results in, at best, political inaction. Union leaders certainly must remember Obama’s “support” for the Employee Free Choice Act (card check) and other pro-worker measures he promised during his campaign and dropped once elected.

For them to uncritically line up behind Obama’s comments on same sex marriage, without clarifying that they consider it a civil rights issue in opposition to the President’s state-by-state approach, makes them look, at best, foolish, at worst, insincere.

It is perhaps hoped by those moved to uncritical support of Obama’s comments to encourage his “evolution” on same sex marriage towards political action that he currently opposes. However, in the realm of politics, such changes are more determined by the movement of social forces than by personal appeals and clever statesmanship.

In other words, the LGBT community and their supporters in Labor must not blunt their struggle for marriage equality in the hope of appealing to the good conscience of corporate politicians and not making too much trouble. They must continue the fight through independent mass action and educating their worker brothers and sisters who currently do not understand the issue of marriage equality.

The best way of educating on a mass level is through common struggle. This was vividly demonstrated in 1974 in a Teamster Local 888 conflict with Coors Brewing Company.

After settling a five-month strike, Coors remained the sole distributor that refused to sign the new contract. Local 888 President Allan Baird realized that his union did not have the ability to win on their own without the active support of the LGBT community in San Francisco. He met with Harvey Milk, who was a rising openly gay activist in the city, hoping to get support for a boycott of Coors.

Milk’s only condition was that the Teamsters begin to hire openly gay drivers. Baird agreed and the union began to hold true to its promise within a week, beginning a city-wide boycott that lasted three years, uniting the interests of the Teamsters and the San Francisco LGBT working class community.

This struggle demonstrates how workers are educated in mass action about the need to overcome anti-gay prejudices in order to win as a class. It also suggests, in miniature, the approach labor leaders can take today that will strengthen the fight for marriage equality. In 1974 the main issue for the Teamsters was to settle the contract fight with Coors.

This lead them to start a form of union-conducted affirmative action in the hiring of openly gay workers. Today, the main issues workers are facing are the need for a real jobs program and the need to stop cuts to such public services as Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and education by taxing the rich.

If the labor movement conducts such a struggle through mass action, independent of the corporate two party system, the need for unity will become apparent. This will create more fertile ground for winning marriage equality for the LGBT community than any presidential campaign statements.

Mark Vorpahl, Infowars

With the advent of the TSA body scanners, using deadly terahertz radiation only adds to the controversy. An array of DNA destroying and cancer causing devices pervade our natural lives.

A recent study conducted using THz radiation found that the radiation’s effects on genetic material are so devastating that they can actually destroy it. THz radiation effectively unzips the double helix strands, creating anomalies that would be detrimental to gene expression and replication.

The report concludes by saying that TSA scanners are not only a gross invasion of privacy, but are also producing long term effects on human health that ultimately shorten the lifespan of those who are unfortunate enough to be affected by them.

Add this to the constant exposure from cell phones, cell phone towers, and other forms of radiation including x-rays from medical procedures, and you have a mega-radiation dose over time. Radiation is indeed harmful; there’s a reason why doctors leave the room after giving patients undergoing radiation a heavy lead coat.

The pervasive nature of this threat has even prompted the FDA to issue guidelines concerning radiation exposure and safety. This report notes of a proposal to create less dangerous scanners and technology in an attempt to mitigate the damage done, espically to younger individuals.

The fact that they would propose taking action shows that they know the effect of radiation is a real threat and causing damage daily. Taking this into account, you should also be aware of the dangers and necessity to protect yourself and others.

Andre Evans, Natura Society

China cuts reserve requirements as economy slumps … The People’s Bank of China will cut the reserve requirement ratio for banks as it moves to stabilise growth. China’s central bank said it would cut banks’ reserve requirements on Friday, after a set of disappointing trade data.

Effective May 18, it will cut the reserve requirement ratio for banks by 50bp to 20%, which it hopes will free up lending and stimulate a recovery — or at least avert a hard landing. – Finance Asia (5/14/2012)

Beware Of The Massive Bubble In Emerging Markets … Amid the excitement over the rise of China, investors and economic commentators have been eagerly scouring the world for “The Next China” – or at least the next country to supply the raw materials that China needs for its boom (and construction of empty cities!)

Soaring asset prices and easy money is creating “luxury fever” as emerging market nations copy the spendthrift ways that led to the West’s downfall just a few years earlier. In its essence, the emerging markets bubble is a derivative of the commodities and China bubbles and is highly vulnerable to their inevitable popping. – Seeking Alpha (5/13/2012)

The world is facing outright depression.

The US remains mired in unemployment and price inflation. Europe, already in chaos, is on the verge of losing the euro. And most importantly, the third leg of the world’s economic stool – the BRICs – is beginning to fail.

India is in the grip of an enormous inflation. So is Brazil. China continues to slump toward the dreaded “hard landing” as its bureaucrats litter the land with enormous, empty cities. The monetary cycle has turned.

The proximate cause of the current, about-to-blossom, full-on slump is the turning of the business cycle in 2001. Gold and silver began to appreciate then. Gold was in the very low triple digits and silver was in the single digits.

Since then gold has bumped up against US$2,000 and silver has climbed toward US$50. This is entirely analogous to the 1970s when the same thing occurred. Gold finally traveled to US$800 and silver to around US$50 – as the ’80 arrived.

At that point, the cycle was controlled by Rockefeller protégé Paul Volcker who, as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, shoved short-term interest rates toward 20 percent.

This made it possible for another 20 years of paper money. But the fundamental misalignment caused by monopoly central banking still remained.

In fact, today, the world is in the grip of the greatest banking bubble ever known. Go to any big financial city and the biggest skyscrapers are usually owned by financial firms – most of which you may never have heard.

Eventually this system shall come crashing down – like unstable skyscrapers themselves. It is an unstated reality. The top men in this world are not fools.

The instability built into the system ultimately collapses it. Enter world government, or at least world money (SDRs?). Out of chaos, order …

The trick is to make it seem natural, inevitable. The EU and the US are commonly held to have slumped in 2008. This is simply a lie. The turning began in 2001. For more than a decade, the West has struggled with monopoly money malinvestment.

The top men of the world refuse to allow a recovery. They have thrown perhaps US$50 TRILLION at the world’s staggering monetary economy. They have used the financial steroids of central banking to pump up a bankrupt system.

Without government/central banking assistance, it is likely that not a single mega, Western financial entity would be around today. The system itself, with its empyrean nonsense, has spawned some US$600 TRILLION in notional derivatives.

And still the system itself limps on, printing money the way a panicked beast in the woods sprays scats. China has been collapsing for a long time, economically and the BRICs generally are in the grip of an inflationary bubble. Argentina may provide the dénouement.

Argentina’s populist leaders recently nationalized the country’s leading oil company. Almost inevitably, Argentina will face a devaluation that will destabilize the dollar economy of Uruguay – the “Switzerland of South America” and perhaps Brazil as well.

Brazil is a leading trade partner with China – and one of the ChiCom’s few, remaining partners of any size. If – or when – Brazil lowers its purchases of Chinese items, there will be literally no place for China to turn.

The paper-money sector must scream out in agony before the cycle turns. And money metals must experience a buying blow-off. But the Golden Bull of the 2000s has not yet lost traction. We know this because junior mining stocks have yet to become strongly bullish. It is the miners – cheap paper gold – that signal the end of the cycle.

The last time the cycle turned, juniors expanded in value and interest rates went to 20 percent. This time, some have suggested rates could go to 50%. And gold could go to US$5,000.

The system will likely not tolerate this.

Confiscation may be the result. Or perhaps as Chinua Achebe famously put it, “Things Fall Apart.”

The old men know this, too. The only thing they apparently didn’t account for – a grievous error – was the Internet itself. And this may finally kill the conspiracy to erect global governance.

Depression, we may have. But the full-scale erection of a global state with a global central bank and global money is by no means preordained. Chaos is possible, even probable. But as for the ultimate end game … well, perhaps the ‘Net has exposed it.

Buy gold. Buy silver. Buy farmland. Plant a garden. Dig a well. Build a power source. Stay online (at least anonymously). And good luck.

A.M. Freyed,  infowars
 

It’s May 7, a week before Mr. Zuckerberg’s 28th birthday. And, as Wall Street, Silicon Valley and the wider world all know, something big is coming. It is the deal that will either prove once and for all that Facebook is changing just about everything, everywhere, or that the mania over social media and this company, its apotheosis, is spiraling out of control …

If all goes well, Facebook will go public on Friday in an I.P.O. that could value it at nearly $100 billion. And so now, as C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg has never been more secure — or, given the coming I.P.O., more exposed … On some evenings, as dusk falls in Menlo Park, Mr. Zuckerberg and a small circle of his lieutenants play roller hockey, and maybe knock back a beer or two, outside Facebook’s headquarters.

Out in the courtyard, the crew — almost all of them men, almost all in their 20s — hoot and skate until it is almost too dark to see much of anything. Across the courtyard floor, giant black tiles spell out the word “hack.” … The Facebook boys and their captain, Mark Zuckerberg, skate hard. They line up shots with care. And they play to win. – NY Times (5/13/2012)
Lady Gaga went to geek camp, too … Gaga, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sergey Brin are all alumni of the Center for Talented Youth (CTY) at Johns Hopkins University.

CTY and the Duke Talent Identification Program (TIP) are two of the most well-known highly selective programs that have given rise to high-achieving adults .

But first, kids have to prove themselves by taking the SAT in about seventh grade, and they need to score as well as or better than 50 percent of the college-bound juniors and seniors taking the SAT or ACT (you can retest later).

Summer Institute for the Gifted, another program, also accepts letters of recommendation and participation in a gifted program as credentials. These camps have programs at various colleges in the U.S., and some in other countries, too .

All of these programs do offer financial assistance to some students, however. Students and alumni tend to agree that it’s all worth it. – CNN Living (9/6/2010)

Another day, another breathless announcement about the Facebook IPO – this one in the form of an extended article in the New York Times that demands no less than three writers and thousands of words.

And likely it’s all a lie of sorts. Zuckerberg is no genius-mogul and Facebook is more a US intelligence asset than a functioning business. But the show must go on, even though it is increasingly a threadbare pretense. The Internet allows us to see clearly how these gambits (scams) are probably perpetuated.

The idea of the global elites, of course, is always to convince the masses that those who work at the top of gigantic corporations and banks are superhuman and deserve their largesse and fame. A quick look at reality provides another perspective entirely.

For the most part, world leaders are staggeringly incompetent and ill-informed … though it is true that many possess native intelligence of sorts. This is not surprising, as they have been selected for this trait. It is in fact seemingly a growing trend as global governance expands.

It is a simple formula. The power elite that wants to run the world has increasingly integrated a seamless network of testing throughout the West to help identify top human youngsters – those who are symbolically facile, even verbally adept without the additional burden of deep thinking.

From the outside looking in, it may seem that the West is an egalitarian place – especially America – where anyone with the requisite combination of hard work, talent and intelligence can make a large success. But in the 21st century this is increasingly myth, not truth.

Increasingly, the global elites are implementing a command-and-control grid that seeks out talented youngsters at an earlier and earlier age.

US President George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” program may be seen as just another one of his goonish, authoritarian visions. But when examined in a larger context, one can see that the US government has laid a grid across the country to identify up-and-coming youngsters at any level, even as young as elementary school.

Once identified, these youngsters are tracked and promoted. They may be the recipients of sudden scholarships or other forms of largesse. Certainly, their quiet rise from obscurity to, possibly, the world stage is supported by a variety of hidden contacts and networks.

These youngsters, eventually, have access to an entire gamut of global elite resources including the vast shadowy marketing machines of Tavistock and other elite promotional facilities.

All they need to do is come up with an idea, a technology (no matter how ephemeral) or in the case of Lady Gaga, a song, a chant … a rap – and the star-making machine goes to work. (OK, perhaps it is NOT preordained but it certainly is close to it.)

It’s a kind of organized crime approach to cultivating talent. After making their selections, elite handlers begin to make the pitch. The quid-pro-quo is surely obvious, and “Monarch Programs” are not necessary. Most – like Zuckerberg – acquiesce willingly and do whatever is required.

Of course, many young people mature late and mathematical capability is not the only kind of creativity. This is not an issue to the top elites. They apparently wish to select for numerical facilities (music, language and math skills) because the owners of such talents are likely to be linear rather than holistic thinkers.

The idea is to present geniuses with outward, dazzling skills but with little in the way of insight or determination to investigate the realities of their larger privilege.

In a sense these youngsters are like performing monkeys, fabulously skilled but incurious when it comes to the system that has launched them. Lady Gaga is said to have composed music at four. Zuckerberg supposedly speaks five languages including Latin. These are the so-called “beautiful minds.”

The privileges are evident and obvious. Zuckerberg, landing in Harvard with the eyes of the elite upon him, was soon smothered in money from various questionable sources including those with close ties to US Intel. Now his company is worth US$100 billion and climbing.

Lady Gaga’s rise was laid by a massive marketing campaign that is surely not available to most other youngsters with similar talents. She entertains billions with increasingly less agile and tuneful songs – or outright plagiarisms.

And when it comes to politics, top operators like US President Barack Obama seem almost entirely manufactured. Obama has hardly revealed anything substantive about his background, and what he has shared has been questionable, or even branded as a forgery. Nonetheless, he may win re-election, such is the power of those who stand in the shadows behind him.

The CNN Living article quoted above seems to give the game away. What are the odds that Lady Gaga, Sergey Brin and Mark Zuckerberg went to the same special school as youngsters? They are astronomical … except that the elites have set up a system to capture such individuals while they are young. The Duke affiliation is no accident, either.

It is no coincidence that the “best and brightest” constantly work for the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund or manifestations of the UN or NGOs. They populate the top levels of Western corporate privilege, politics and mainstream media.

One can visualize them as the fodder of global governance. They are the stylish male and female models of the New World Order – groomed to portray a face that is at once friendly and brilliant in order to convince lesser mortals that the coming globalism is inevitable. The “smartest people” are participating, after all.

An uber-class is being built up patiently, piece by piece. Youngsters in the West may dream of climbing ambitiously to the top, but little do they know the places are already taken.

AmericanFreed

In April, the federal czar of planes, trains and automobiles, Ray LaHood, called for making texting while driving illegal.

Now a New Jersey city has passed a law to make it illegal to text while walking.

“Fort Lee, N.J. police said they will begin issuing $85 jaywalking tickets to pedestrians who are caught texting while walking.” reports ABC News.

Thomas Ripoli, chief of the Fort Lee Police Department, said he “hopes his crackdown on people who display dangerous behavior while walking will make his town safer, but not everyone is on board with the idea of issuing $85 tickets.”

No doubt Fort Lee’s bureaucrats are “on board” with the revenue enhancement potential of the new law. It will now be Christmas all year long.

How long before talking on a cellphone while walking becomes “dangerous walking”?

People are distracted by all kinds of things – an argument with a spouse or relative, the loss of a job, federally imposed income taxes. How long before these are considered dangerous “distracted walking” and are used as an excuse to fill city coffers?

James Madison comes to mind:

“I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”

Kurt Nimmo, Infowars

Forget about viewing events in countries as separate incidents. Syria, Iran and the Gulf monarchies are closely bound up in US-led war plans in the Middle East that are aimed at projecting American political, economic and military power across this vital region and beyond.

Events today are but a continuum with US wars of conquest in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Libya as part of an unfolding agenda for hegemony.

First, this week it emerged that the purported Kofi Annan Peace Plan is all but dead. For the past four weeks, the US-led foreign powers have done everything to make sure the supposed peace plan would fail, from Western governments and media constantly excoriating Syrian President Bashar Al Assad for allegedly not abiding by the ceasefire, while these same powers have assiduously supported mercenary groups to go on a full terror assault involving no-warning car bombs and shootings.

US officials are not yet declaring the Annan ceasefire over, but actions on the ground speak volumes. An influx of more powerful weaponry is reported to now have reached the so-called Syrian rebels.

The mercenaries trying to topple the Assad government are largely foreign jihadist elements from Libya, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. In weeks prior to the 12 April ceasefire, the Syrian government forces were gaining the upperhand, routing these armed groups from their base in the city of Homs.

Under the strictures of the ceasefire, which were tightly and unilaterally applied by Western governments and media to the conduct of the Syrian army, the armed opposition groups appear to have taken advantage of the respite to inflict their worse and to reorganise.

Two massive car bombs in the capital, Damascus, on 10 May killed 55 and injured more than 400. The blasts were so powerful they left two large craters in the roads.

This week the foreign-backed mercenaries were reported to have killed 23 Syrian army troops in the town of Rastan, near Homs. The surge in deaths among civilians and security forces reflects the increased firepower that is now making its way into the hands of the mercenaries.

According to the Washington Post, the Gulf monarchies, mainly Saudi Arabia and Qatar, are financing the new shipments of weapons. This is drawn from the war-chest of $100 million that was pledged by the US-backed Arab autocrats at the conference in Istanbul at the beginning of April.

Officially, the Obama administration is maintaining a cynical fiction that it is only supplying “non-lethal material” to the Syrian armed groups. But it is the US that is now assuming the crucial lead role of overseeing the distribution and deployment of new weapons flowing into Syria.

“The US contacts with the rebel military and the information-sharing with Gulf nations mark a shift in Obama administration policy as hopes [sic] dim for a political solution to the Syrian crisis. Many officials now consider an expanding military confrontation to be inevitable,” reports the Washington Post on the 16 May.

The intensified US-led assault on Syria is not merely aimed at taking out the Assad government. It is an integral part of a long-held Washington plan for imperial dominance across the entire region that has been conducted under the pretexts of “war on terror” and “responsibility to protect”.

That is why two other developments this week bear wider significance. Claims disseminated in the Western media that Iran has been using a blast chamber to test nuclear explosions are aimed at elevating again the “rogue spectre” of Iran and criminalizing the government of Tehran.

The latest accusations of nuclear weaponisation by Iran come ahead of the second round of P5+1 negotiations next week, which the US-led Western powers have relentlessly used to browbeat Tehran over its legitimate right to develop civilian nuclear energy.

Of course, “nuclear ambitions” – so often said in pejorative tones by the Western powers and their subservient media – have got little to do with the real agenda, which is all about trying to engineer regime change in Tehran to one that will be pliable to Western imperialist interests.

The fatuous Western media coverage on events in Syria over the past year has tried in vain to portray them as part of an heroic Arab Spring revolt by the masses seeking democratic rights.

In truth, the Western powers and their Arab/Israeli/Turkish proxies have been inflaming violence in Syria with callous disregard for human rights and democracy, with the immediate goal of achieving pliable regime change in Damascus and ultimately likewise in its regional ally, Tehran.

The covert US-led war on Syria is an integral part of its covert war on Iran. When this war on Syria moves up a gear as signalled by the influx of heavy weapons now flowing into that country, then the corollary is a stepwise aggression towards Iran.

The poisoning of P5+1 negotiations, before they have even resumed, with lurid, baseless claims about Iran testing nuclear weapons is a signal of stepped-up aggression.

Finally, the third development this week pertaining to America’s permanent war ambitions in the oil-rich region was the unveiling of plans for a closer political and military union between the US-backed Gulf monarchs, including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman.

These autocratic Sunni regimes have grown increasingly hostile towards Iran under Washington’s tutelage in recent years.

Provocatively, the Gulf union plans cited the “threat of Iran” without providing an iota of evidence to support such a tendentious allegation.

Significantly, when Iran objected to the proposed hostile Sunni bloc, it was met with fiery denunciations from its Persian Gulf neighbours of “flagrantly violating” their sovereignty in what sounded like a choreographed collision course.

The idea for a closer Gulf union was previously promoted by US secretary of state Hillary Clinton when she visited the Saudi capital Riyadh at the of March on her way to the weapons fundraiser in Istanbul to support the Syrian mercenaries.

On the agenda in her meeting with the Gulf dictators in Riyadh was the setting up of a joint missile system for the Persian Gulf shaihkdoms.

Taken together, the escalation of war in Syria, the imputing of casus belli against Iran, and the lining up of hostile Gulf Arab states, represent more than a sinister pattern of coincidences. It’s a plan of war.